A few seconds later I could hear the welcome sound but the laptop screen was blank.

I connected an external monitor via HDMI and the image came up on the external monitor

And so I scoured the net and came across this forum thread and realise that my laptop's LCD panel was showing an image alright but the backlight was off - confirmed this by squinting closely at my laptop's LCD panel.

I followed unknown47's advice and restarted and it worked. If you have an Acer Aspire laptop and have a similar problem, do this:

In the yet open "Network Connections" window, select "Tata Indicom (Photon+)" and click the "Edit" button.

In the "Username" field, type "internet".

In the "Password" field, type "internet".

Click "Apply".

Close the "Network Connections" window.

Left click the network icon next to the clock and from the menu that appears, select "Tata Indicom (Photon+)".

Wait for your computer to connect to the internet and then start browsing away to glory. To disconnect, repeat step 32.

Next time, you will just have to plug in your modem, wait for a few seconds for the "Tata Indicom (Photon+)" show up when you left click the network icon next to the clock and then click on it to connect again.

The Tata Photon+ modem has a ZeroCD feature which allows the device to act as a CDROM drive containing its own drivers and application installation files. This CDROM mode is the default mode when the device is plugged in to your USB. To use the device as a modem, we need to force it to switch modem - a task which is achieved on Microsoft Windows by the drivers which are installed from the virtual CDROM drive. On Ubuntu, editing the "40-usb_modeswitch.rules" in steps 9 thru 15 above helps automate the task of the forcing the Tata Photon+ USB device to switch from mass storage mode (acting as a CDROM drive) to modem mode. If "40-usb_modeswitch.rules" is not edited, one would have to execute the command sudo usb_modeswitch -c /etc/usb_modeswitch.d/201e\:2009 everytime the Tata Photon+ device is plugged in.

Step 17 - restarting your computer: may not be necessary, but it doesn't hurt anyway.

Step 19 - It takes a few seconds for the modem to boot up and for the computer to force it to change modes and be recognised by the Network Manager as a modem.

Tata Photon+ distributed many different versions of it USB Modem devices. The above post is only applicable for the ones marked "V-ME101"

Sunday, September 4, 2011

Compilers for microcontrollers from Renesas Electronics like R8C and M16C usually output a .mot file which is a Motorola S-record file. This is a standard ASCII text file which contains the opcodes to be placed at each location within the target microcontroller's program flash memory. A programmer application software would read this .mot file and program the flash memory of the microcontroller chip accordingly. Motorola S-record format is somewhat similar to Intel HEX file format

The following quick reference chart will help you understand the Motorola S-record file format easily - specially useful if you are developing software to parse .mot file. The diagram was based on the data presented at: http://www.amelek.gda.pl/avr/uisp/srecord.htm

A4 Landscape PDF File of the above diagram is here.I have also made this diagram available on Wikimedia Commons here and have embedded it in the SREC article on Wikipedia.

Here is a random list of barcodes I scanned off of various products around my bedroom.

LUSDJ0D165050038A11601

4718235227159

8904149401006

8903539010200

8901124715332

9788184890266

9781408809594

9780595142361

9780007428052

9780743440295

9722121221225

LXPG40C0269290B9161601

92904738216

SA00000183A

4902430281232

355067048902647

HT13XTJ26185

99HMN005-00

4710937348842

205000001519991

W1255ZCZC00072R

884912116505

8901499006653

037000230151

8901491503051

8901491104555

8902080504060

8902570801860

8901138714550

8901424008332

8901396465003

8901030207068

8901023005800

8901396144007

8901396112136

8902570801471

4902430354332

8901396151258

8901571001248

8901012155035

8901393004700

89000816

8901207900839

8901233008011

8901063004023

8901063035034

8901876001035

SLF02A067030004802

8901207503559

8901207503221

6589726583256

884898315176

4800888142238

8901296102121

8901180118023

8901860010517

4711734822603

6932008080019

8906016571058

074470584933

Bar codes can be used to encodes lots of different kinds of data, Universal Product Codes being one of them. http://www.upcdatabase.com is a good source to figure out what each Universal Product Code Stands for:

For example:

9781408809594

This is a Bookland ISBN code, which means it's an ISBN number encoded as an EAN/UCC-13. You can tell this by the first three digits of the EAN/UCC-13 (978). The numbers after that are the ISBN. You'll notice the last digits differ, though -- EAN/UCC-13 and ISBN calculate their check digits differently (in fact, the check 'digit' on an ISBN can be a digit or the letter X).

Here is the iball Linear Barcode Scanner User Manual and Configuration Leaflet. This barcode scanner does not have any buttons on it and neither is it supplied with any application/device driver software. The bar code scanner emulates a standard USB HID Keyboard. All data read from a bar code is sent to the computer as key presses. The user manual has various bar codes printed in it. To change the settings of the barcode scanner, one has to scan the bar code associated with that configuration change and voila! the new setting will take effect immediately (of course you have to scan bar codes for "start configuration" and "stop configuration" too and you may need to power cycle the device too)

Barcode Scanner from ZXing Team is a nice Android app which uses your cell phone's camera to read barcodes off of products and then fetches their description and price from the internet and displays the data on the screen.

Newlib is a C standard library implementation intended for use on embedded systems. It is a conglomeration of several library parts, all under free software licenses that make them easily usable on embedded products.

The MD5 Message-Digest Algorithm is a widely used cryptographic hash function that produces a 128-bit (16-byte) hash value. Specified in RFC 1321, MD5 has been employed in a wide variety of security applications, and is also commonly used to check data integrity